Monument to Andrei Sakharov

On Academician Sakharov Square, between the main building of St Petersburg State University and the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, stands a bronze figure of the physicist and human-rights advocate Andrei Sakharov. It is the first monument to the scientist in the country and one of the few monuments in St Petersburg that belongs to neither the pre-revolutionary nor the Soviet tradition of urban sculpture.

The idea of commemorating Sakharov in Leningrad was put forward by deputies of the city council as early as the beginning of the 1990s, shortly after his death. In May 1996, to mark the scientist's 75th birthday, the square in front of the university was named after him on the initiative of deputy Lev Romankov — the event was marked by a rally attended by Mayor Anatoly Sobchak and the philologist Dmitry Likhachev. That same summer a design competition for a monument was announced, won by a project from the architect Evgeny Rapoport — a granite cube with a symbolic crack — but the jury acknowledged that funds were insufficient to realise it, and a repeat competition in 1997, held amid a change of city leadership, gradually lost momentum.

From 1998 the sculptor Leonid Lazarev worked on the final image of the monument. His Sakharov is a stooped bronze figure that seems almost to hover in the air, its head held proudly high, its arms clasped behind its back in a way that evokes either a prisoner or angel's wings: the sculptor sought to portray neither a theoretical physicist nor a dissident, but a man not of this world. The pedestal is a granite boulder about 190 centimetres high, conceived as a kind of 'anti-pedestal' emphasising the unconventional nature of the whole monument; the figure itself stands three and a half metres tall.

The unveiling of the monument was postponed to May 2003, to coincide with St Petersburg's tercentenary, and the project was financed entirely by private donations. Shortly before the opening a conflict arose with the university's leadership, who feared the monument would interfere with the traditional first-year students' assembly on the square, and the city's chief architect had in any case never given his approval for the project. An initiative group installed the sculpture on the prepared pedestal without authorisation, on the night of 3–4 May, while the official opening ceremony took place on the 5th, with speeches by the writer Daniil Granin, the human-rights activist Yuri Rybakov and the actor Oleg Basilashvili.

The monument received mixed reviews: some critics called it a substitution of pathos with grotesque, while others considered it a significant artistic achievement. The scientist's widow, Elena Bonner, publicly opposed the very idea of erecting a monument to her husband in present-day Russia, regarding any such monument as an inappropriate gesture from the same state that had once persecuted him.

Today the monument remains part of everyday life on Vasilyevsky Island — university students pass it every day, and the square itself has long been associated in residents' minds with the name of the scientist and human-rights advocate. The story of its installation, accompanied by disputes and unauthorised action on the part of its initiators, has become for the city a symbol of the difficult path taken by public memory of the Soviet dissident movement.